I can walk under ladders
My husband defended his dissertation.
I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.
The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.
My marriage is better than it ever was.
There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.
Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.
Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.
Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.
We live in a lovely house.
Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.
I am a writer.
I can transcend.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.
Thank you for being a part of it.
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II:
Resonance
OK, OK, OK, Part I was the
result yet another prompt, from a family
visit in September. It was a photo prompt
that had nothing to do with the resulting
piece. I was going through my old stuff,
looking for something, saw this, thought:
Aha! That feeling some of us get after too
much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I
haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years,
and if I did, it would actually be wonderful
to be with my mother, though
Kevin's
absence would still be
palpable.
Sometimes I'm afraid that
you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe
you think that I sit around immersing myself
in the past, feeling sorry for myself and
penning various memorials to the me who used
to be. Or that I prefer to
dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy
and light.
I write about what resonates and I have a
complex relationship with both happiness and
the past. The past is always present for me;
it informs the present, keeps me grounded.
And it provides me with great material. Don't
even have to think about it. As for
happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy.
I'm generally happy,
except when I'm not.
The hollows,
shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me.
Light is meaningless without darkness. I need
texture, a rough patch here and there, a
little complexity and strife to make it more
interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies.
More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my
husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or
maybe it really will be about puppies, cute
little fluffballs, good enough to
eat.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling
Stone.
The centerpiece of
Thanksgiving dinner was a rockfish one year.
Kevin had caught it himself, straight from
the Chesapeake Bay. Mom stuffed it with
breadcrumbs spiked with chopped fennel and
onion, and there were mashed potatoes,
cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans
on the side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about
politics as usual. I wish I could go back and
capture those conversations, remember the
deep level jokes and high level discussions.
Almost any dinner with my mother and Kevin
was devoted to real conversation and humor,
sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was
the closest we ever came to feeling like a
family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin
got sick, when he was just starting his PhD
program at Penn, and Augie the collie was a
puppy. I had taken the train from DC to
Wilmington to visit and things were unusually
smooth, no arguments, very little baiting. We
ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in the
candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled
with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil,
garlicky and herby and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin
had taken a year off from college in 1966
after being busted for selling marijuana (a
setup, he claimed) and he headed off to
California, hitchhiked down the coast. He
talked about Dylan going electric, mentioned
the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles
devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones
fans. There was talk of high school dances,
the moves and the moments. The radio was
playing music from that era and he and Mom
started to slow dance as I watched from the
table.
What do you do when a
family culture dies? When a powerful
personality disappears? The center did not
hold. We’re still trying to create our own
gravity.